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"Do you know what our greatest corporate expense is?" Sergey asked at TGIF. The assembled Googlers looked up from their laptops. Everyone wanted the chance to be right in front of others.

"Health insurance!" shouted an engineer. "Salaries!" "Servers!" "Taxes!"

"Electricity!" "Charlie's groce…

[...] To prove that Google wasn't composed entirely of metal and wiring attached to positronic brains, I suggested we collect photos of moms from our coworkers and arrange them around the old poem spelling out "What Mother Means to Me." Straight out of the Hallmark emotional-manipulation handbook. …

About the time Ian Marsden's first Doodle ran, Karen hired an intern to help with updating the website. The intern, Dennis Hwang, was majoring in art and computer science and had helped with graphics for the gator-gone-wild horror flick Lake Placid ("You'll never know what bit you"). During his int…

Perhaps because they viewed the world through a polarizing filter of "ideal" and "suboptimal" (or "good" and "evil," if you will) and were so confident about which position they occupied in this binary system, our founders displayed a fondness for hyperbolic vilification of those who disagreed with…

"The most important thing to consider," I began, "is that our own internal research shows our competitors are beginning to approach Google's level of quality. In a world where all search engines are equal, we'll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from everyone else."

The room grew quie…